The Fallen Angel

they reached the next cistern. Lavon paused and looked around in wonder. Then he raised a forefinger to his lips to tell Gabriel to keep his voice down.

“Do you recognize it?” Gabriel whispered.

Lavon nodded his head vigorously. “The T shape is consistent with a cistern that Warren found here,” he answered, his voice a hoarse whisper. “It was probably dug during the time of Herod. The stone quarried from this spot might very well have been used for the Temple itself.”

“Where are we on the Mount?”

“Just outside the entrance to al-Aqsa.” He pointed down the length of the horizontal portion of the T. “There should be another small T-shaped cistern right over there. And then—”

“The Great Sea?”

Lavon nodded his head and then led Gabriel across the upper portion of the ancient cistern. At the opposite side was the mouth of another aqueduct, narrower than the last. As he expected, it bore them into the next cistern. This time, they made their way to the foot of the T and entered the next aqueduct. After a few paces, the vast cathedral-like chasm of the Great Sea opened before them.

And it was entirely empty.

“Well?” asked the prime minister.

Navot shook his head.

“What are they going to do now?”

“They’re working on it.”

At the roof of the chamber was an opening, like the oculus at the top of the Pantheon in Rome. Through it streamed a shaft of brilliant sunlight and the sound of the amplified sermon blasting from the minaret of the al-Aqsa Mosque.

“How far below the surface are we?” asked Gabriel in a whisper.

“Forty-three feet.”

“Or thirteen meters,” Gabriel pointed out.

“Thirteen point ten meters,” Lavon corrected him.

“If Dina is right,” Gabriel said, “the bomb would be in a chamber more than a hundred feet beneath us.”

“Which would make sense,” Lavon said.

“Why?”

“Because if I were going to take down the Temple Mount plateau, I’d want to place the charge lower than this.”

“Is there a way down from here?”

“No one’s ever been below this—at least no one we know about.” He turned and studied the distant wall of the cavern. There were three more aqueducts, each leading in a slightly different direction. “Pick one,” he said.

“I’m an art restorer, Eli. You pick.”

Lavon closed his eyes for a few seconds and then pointed to the aqueduct on the right.

At that same moment, Imam Hassan Darwish was less than one hundred feet away, in the cistern beneath the Well of Souls. In his hand was the Makarov pistol that Abdullah Ramadan had given to him before heading into the depths of the Noble Sanctuary to confront the invading Jews. The sound of the brief but intense battle had carried through the aqueducts, directly to Darwish’s ears. He had heard everything, including the sound of his own name being shouted in agony. Now he could hear the soft, muffled footfalls of at least two men approaching the chamber that Darwish had secretly carved from the Holy Mountain. It was there he had hidden the bomb that would destroy it and thus destroy the State of Israel. But there was something else inside the chamber other than explosives—a secret that no one, especially the Jews, could be allowed to see.

He looked at his watch: 2:27. At Darwish’s instructions, the man known as Mr. Farouk had set the timing device on the weapon to go off at three o’clock. He had chosen the time, the supposed hour of Christ’s death on the cross, as a calculated insult to the whole of Christianity, but it was not the only reason. By three o’clock, the Friday prayer services in al-Aqsa would be over, and the crowds of Muslim faithful would be departing the Noble Sanctuary. But for the moment, the three hundred and eighty thousand square feet of the great mosque were filled to capacity with more than five thousand people. Darwish had no choice but to turn them all into holy martyrs. And himself as well.

He remained in the cistern beneath the Well of Souls for a moment longer, reciting the final prayers of the shahid. Then, with the Makarov pistol in one hand and a flashlight in the other, he set out along a narrow, ancient passage. It bore him downward into the earth and backward through time. It was the time before Islam and the Prophet. The time of ignorance, he thought. The time of the Jews.

The first aqueduct terminated after about fifty feet in a small fishbowl of a cistern, so they quickly retraced their steps to the Great Sea and entered the second channel. After just a few steps, Lavon came upon an aperture in the right side that led to still another passage. The ground was littered with fragments of loose limestone. Lavon inspected them in the glow of his headlamp and then ran his hand over the edges of the opening.

“This is new.”

“How new?”

“New new,” Lavon said. “It looks as though it was cut quite recently.”

Without another word, he set off down the conduit, Gabriel at his heels. After a few paces, there appeared a flight of wide, curving steps that were obviously carved by modern stone-cutting tools. Lavon plunged downward in a rage, with Gabriel a few steps behind, struggling to keep pace. At the bottom of the steps was an archway with a few characters of Arabic script carved into the stone above the apex. They shot past it without a glance. Then, awestruck, they came suddenly to a stop.

“What the hell is that?” asked Gabriel.

Lavon seemed incapable of speech.

“Eli, what is it?”

Lavon took a few tentative steps forward. “Don’t you recognize them, Gabriel?”

“Recognize what, Eli?”

“The pillars,” he said. “The pillars that were in the photograph.”

“And where are the pillars from?”

Lavon smiled, breathless. “ ‘The House which King Solomon built for the Lord was sixty cubits long, twenty cubits wide, and thirty cubits high.’ ”

“What is it, Uzi?” the prime minister asked.

“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”

“Try me.”

“Eli thinks he just found remnants of the First Temple. And by the way,” Navot added, “they also found the bomb.”

The prime minister looked up at the video monitor and saw thousands of Muslims streaming out of the al- Aqsa Mosque. Then he looked at the men seated around him and gave the order to send in the police and the IDF.

“It’s better than the alternative,” Navot said, watching as the first Israeli forces entered the Noble Sanctuary.

“We’ll see about that.”

46 THE TEMPLE MOUNT, JERUSALEM

THE CAVERN WAS THE SIZE of a school gymnasium. Tilting his headlamp skyward, Gabriel noticed the crude light fixtures hanging from the roof and the power line that snaked down one wall to an industrial-grade switch. Throwing it, he flooded the vast space with a heavenly white light.

“My God,” gasped Eli Lavon. “Don’t you see what they’ve done?”

Yes, thought Gabriel, running his hand over the glassy smooth surface of the freshly hewn wall. He could